American HeritageA variety of titles remind us that black history is American history

By Diann Blakely

FEBRUARY 21, 2000:
It's Black History Month, and bookstores are prominently displaying
classics like Their Eyes Were Watching God alongside recent
big-sellers like Africans in America, A Lesson Before Dying,
and what the publishing industry refers to as "Girlfriend Novels,"
ubiquitous since Terry Macmillan's Waiting to Exhale rose to
bestsellerdom in 1992. Long before "crossover" hits like these, though,
independent presses knew that interest in African American culture wasn't
limited to black readers. Moreover, such houses believed that crucial
chapters of the American experience could only be told from the black point
of view.

One of the best of these independent presses is Lawrence Hill. Among its
recent offerings is the "Library of Black America" series. Yuval Taylor,
who serves as the series' general editor, also assembled its first volume,
I Was Born a Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives, and
its third, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings. The
latter condenses five volumes of Douglass' speeches, letters, articles, and
editorials from Philip S. Foner's definitive set. The second volume in this
handsome series collects the fiction of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, whose
shamanic cameo in last year's Bulworth has led to a renewal of
interest in his work.

Lawrence Hill has also recently published an updated edition of Mel
Watkins' On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy From
Slavery to Chris Rock. Watkins, a former editor of The New York
Times Book Review, uses humor as a lens for exploring American race
relations. "For a vulnerable black minority," he writes, "surreptitiousness
and trickery were the principal defenses against repression." The latter
often involved false ignorance and naiveté--think "Sambo" of the
minstrel shows, Amos and Andy, or Eddie Murphy in some of his Saturday
Night Live routines. But playing dumb--a ruse scarcely limited to the
African American cultural tradition--has its drawbacks, having too often
"fostered and affirmed the most insidious and demeaning stereotypes."

Yet what Watkins calls "Sambo comedy" serves as one of the foundations
of modern African American comedy; "surreptitious" humor, developed in the
privacy of wholly black settings, represents the other. Watkins explores
both, showing how the latter began to trickle into the mainstream with
performers like Redd Foxx. The author's inclusion of jokes from slavery
times to mid-century to the present era--including those of Foxx, Dick
Gregory, Richard Pryor, Whoopi Goldberg, and Chris Rock--makes for a
compendious, erudite cultural study that is also a delight to read.

If the American experience in black--and white--can be told through the
evolution of its comedy, it can be told equally well through its various
musical traditions. DaCapo Press, which specializes in popular musicology
and music biographies, has published classics of the literature, from
Samuel Charters' pioneering studies of the blues to Divided Soul: The
Life of Marvin Gaye. DaCapo's offerings continue to expand: Among its
newest titles are Chip Deffaa's Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythms and
Blues and Robert Nicholson's Mississippi: The Blues Today, the
latter of which features photography by Memphian Logan Young.

Massachusetts was once home to 18th-century African American poet
Phillis Wheatley and to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's
Cabin. Today, it's home to the University of Massachusetts press, which
has just published a groundbreaking guide to African American cultural
history. Write Me a Few of Your Lines: A Blues Reader, edited by
Steven C. Tracy, offers selections from nearly every major blues-based
folklorist, musicologist, critic, social commentator, novelist, and poet in
its 600-plus pages, along with excerpts from important related documents
like The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.

Tracy defines the blues' importance to the 20th century through a brief
discussion of Zora Neale Hurston's fictional masterpiece, Their Eyes
Were Watching God: Hurston "carves out," he writes, "a mythic space in
words that establishes the 'lowly' front porch of the rural, small-town
general store at day's end as the place where the politically and socially
powerless become the lords of sound." This is a perfect metaphor for the
blues, which Tracy calls "this century's humbling towering art form."
Through this oral tradition, he explains, African Americans have been able
to transcend the inferiority imposed on them by white culture.

One glaring omission in Tracy's pioneering and largely definitive opus
is Jean Toomer, whose Cane remains one of the great works of the
Harlem Renaissance. Hill Street Press in Atlanta has just published
Essentials, a less well-known book by Toomer, who was a longtime
student of Eastern mysticism. Essentials belongs with collections of
spiritual/psychological/aesthetic aphorisms like Pascal's
Pensées and Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. Toomer
both anticipates and critiques today's neo-transcendentalism with
statements like, "Man adjusts to what he should not; he is unable to adjust
to what he should."

Such language is oddly abstract and disembodied, especially when set
beside the humid red clay and pine-resonant landscapes of Cane.
Nonetheless, Essentials remains an important book.

Interesting, thought-provoking volumes about African American culture
are no longer the sole province of independent publishing houses. A few
mainstream publishers have recognized the growing--and racially
mixed--audience for books previously thought to appeal only to the black
"niche market." Thus Random House, under its Clarkson Potter imprint, has
issued Maya Angelou: The Poetry of Living, a celebratory book of
photographs and testimonials on the life and work of one of our most famous
poets. Similarly, Ballantine, in its Library of Contemporary Thought
series, recently commissioned Walter Mosley to write about race and
economics at the millennium. The result is a brief but exhilaratingly
impassioned volume called Workin' on the Chain Gang: Shaking Off the
Dead Hand of History.

Mosley is justly celebrated for creating the Easy Rawlins mysteries, the
visionary RL's Dream, and the Socrates Fortlow works, but he has
also earned a nearly heroic reputation for hands-on activism in the
literary community, including his support of institutions as diverse as the
Poetry Society of America and the Black Classic Press. Workin' on the
Chain Gang draws both on his activism and his imagination, and the
result is a lyrically insightful, elegantly argued, and morally bracing
book.

Mosley uses metaphor to unite, rather than divide, those less than
enchanted by our neo-gilded age. "There is an echo of Jim Crow in the HMO,"
he writes, in the way people are "shunted aside, denied access, and allowed
to suffer with no real democratic resource. Downsizing is an excellent way
of robbing a worker of her accrued wealth. The widening gap between rich
and poor is a way of demonizing the latter, because poverty is a sin in the
richest country in the world. These new systems of injustice wear the
trappings of freedom, but they are just as unacceptable as their
forebears."

Everyone in our country, Mosley insists, can learn from slavery's
legacy, which he calls "a torch in the darkness" for its strength,
resistance, and creativity in dealing with oppression and marginalization.
Indeed, Mosley states outright what the other writers mentioned above
imply: "Black American history is American history."